The Wildfire Reader presents, in an affordable paperback edition, the essays included in Wildfire, offering a concise overview of fire landscapes and the past century of forest policy that has affected them.
Posted in Business & Economics

Explores wildfires from ecological, economic, and sociopolitical perspectives while documenting how past forest policies have hindered the natural wildfire process, creating the conditions for more dangerous fires in the future.
Posted in Law

Yellowstone National Park looks like a pristine western landscape populated by its wild inhabitants: bison, grizzly bears, and wolves. But the bison do not always range freely, snowmobile noise intrudes upon the park’s profound winter silence, and some tourist villages are located in prime grizzly bear habitat. Despite these problems, the National Park Service has succeeded in reintroducing wolves, allowing wildfires to play their natural role in park forests, and prohibiting a gold mine that would be present in other more typical western landscapes. Each of these issues—bison, snowmobiles, grizzly bears, wolves, fires, and the New World Mine—was the center of a recent policy-making controversy involving federal politicians, robust debate with interested stakeholders, and discussions about the relevant science. Yet, the outcomes of the controversies varied considerably, depending on politics, science, how well park managers allied themselves with external interests, and public thinking about the effects of park proposals on their access and economies. Michael Yochim examines the primary influences upon contemporary national park policy making and considers how those influences shaped or constrained the final policy. In addition, Yochim considers how park managers may best work within the contemporary policy-making context to preserve national parks.
Posted in History

This volume investigates the interdisciplinary and cross-cutting challenges in the risk analysis of natural hazards. It brings together leading minds in engineering, science, philosophy, law, and the social sciences. Parts I and II of this volume explore risk assessment, first by providing an overview of the interdisciplinary interactions involved in the assessment of natural hazards, and then by exploring the particular impacts of climate change on natural hazard assessment. Part III discusses the theoretical frameworks for the evaluation of natural hazards. Finally, Parts IV and V address the risk management of natural hazards, providing first an overview of the interdisciplinary interactions underlying natural hazard management, and then exploring decision frameworks that can help decision makers integrate and respond to the complex relationships among natural events, the built environment, and human behavior.
Posted in Science

'I've watched deer and elk frolic in the meadow below me, and pine trees explode in a blue ball of smoke. If there's a better job anywhere on the planet, I'd like to know what it is.’ For nearly a decade, Philip Connors has spent half of each year in a small room at the top of a tower, on top of a mountain, alone in millions of acres of remote American wilderness. His job: to look for wildfires. Capturing the wonder and grandeur of this most unusual job and place, Fire Season evokes both the eerie pleasure of solitude and the majesty, might and beauty of untamed fire at its wildest. Connors’ time up on the peak is filled with drama – there are fires large and small; spectacular midnight lightning storms and silent mornings awakening above the clouds; surprise encounters with smokejumpers, black bears, and an abandoned, dying fawn. Filled with Connors’ heartfelt reflections on our place in the wild, Fire Season is an instant modern classic: a remarkable memoir that is at once an homage to the beauty of nature, the blessings of solitude, and the freedom of the independent spirit. Advance praise for Fire Season: ‘A masterwork of close observation, deep reflection, and hard-won wisdom . . . an unforgettable reckoning with the American land’ Philip Gourevitch ‘His adventures in radical solitude make for profoundly absorbing, restorative reading’ Walter Kirn
Posted in Biography & Autobiography

Published at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Sustainable Landscape Construction took a new approach to what was then a nearly new subject: how to construct outdoor environments based on principles of sustainability. This enormously influential book helped to spur a movement that has taken root around the U.S. and throughout the world. The second edition has been thoroughly updated to include the most important developments in this landscape revolution, along with the latest scientific research in the field. It has been expanded to provide even more ideas for designing, building, and maintaining environmentally sensitive landscapes. It is essential reading for everyone with an interest in “green” landscape design. Like its predecessor, the new edition of Sustainable Landscape Construction is organized around principles that reflect the authors’ desire to put environmental ethics into practice. Each chapter focuses on one over-arching idea. These principles of sustainability are clearly articulated and are developed through specific examples. More than 100 projects from around the globe are described and illustrated. A new chapter details ways in which landscape architectural practice must respond to the dangers posed by fire, floods, drought, extreme storms, and climate change. Sustainable Landscape Construction is a crucial complement to basic landscape construction texts, and is a one-of-a-kind reference for professionals, students, and concerned citizens.
Posted in Architecture

The topic of our natural resources has become an important issue over the last few years. The abundance of some (and scarcity of others) has sparked many a debate. The four volumes in this set discuss not only the aspects of the resources themselves, but their economic and social impact as well. Plus, complimentary online access is provided through Salem Science.
Posted in Nature

Over the past two decades, a select group of small but highly effective grassroots organizations have achieved remarkable success in protecting endangered species and forests in the United States. The Rebirth of Environmentalism tells for the first time the story of these grassroots biodiversity groups. Author Douglas Bevington offers engaging case studies of three of the most influential biodiversity protection campaigns - the Headwaters Forest campaign, the "zero cut" campaign on national forests, and the endangered species litigation campaign exemplified by the Center for Biological Diversity - providing the reader with an in-depth understanding of the experience of being involved in grassroots activism. Based on first-person interviews with key activists in these campaigns, the author explores the role of tactics, strategy, funding, organization, movement culture, and political conditions in shaping the influence of the groups. He also examines the challenging relationship between radicals and moderate groups within the environmental movement, and addresses how grassroots organizations were able to overcome constraints that had limited the advocacy of other environmental organizations. Filled with inspiring stories of activists, groups, and campaigns that most readers will not have encountered before, The Rebirth of Environmentalism explores how grassroots biodiversity groups have had such a big impact despite their scant resources, and presents valuable lessons that can help the environmental movement as a whole - as well as other social movements - become more effective.
Posted in Nature

ENERGY takes an unflinching look at the systems that support our insatiable thirst for more power (and the ideas behind those systems) along with their unintended side effects. From oil spills, nuclear accidents, mountaintop-removal coal mining, and natural gas "fracking" to wind power projects and solar power plants, every source of energy has costs. Virtually every region of the globe now experiences the consequences of out-of-control energy development. No place is sacred, no landscape is safe from the relentless search for resources to power perpetual economic growth. Even the composition of the global atmosphere is affected -- book jacket.
Posted in Business & Economics

Fire, both inevitable and ubiquitous, plays a crucial role in North American ecosystems. But as necessary as fire is to maintaining healthy ecosystems, it threatens human lives and livelihoods in unacceptable ways. This volume explores the rich yet largely uncharted terrain at the intersection of fire policy, fire science, and fire management in order to find better ways of addressing this pressing dilemma. Written in clear language, it will help scientists, policy makers, and the general public, especially residents of fire-prone areas, better understand where we are today in regard to coping with wildfires, how we got here, and where we need to go. Drawing on abundant historical and analytic information to shed new light on current controversies, Living with Fire offers a dynamic new paradigm for coping with fire that recognizes its critical environmental role. The book also tells how we can rebuild the important ecological and political processes that are necessary for finding better ways to cope with fire and with other complex policy dilemmas.
Posted in Nature

Posted on 2006-11-05 by Dean Apostol,Society for Ecological Restoration International

the art and science of ecological restoration in Cascadia

Author: Dean Apostol,Society for Ecological Restoration International

Publisher: Island Pr

ISBN: 9781559630788

Category: Nature

Page: 475

View: 939

The Pacific Northwest is a global ecological "hotspot" because of its relatively healthy native ecosystems, a high degree of biodiversity, and the number and scope of restoration initiatives that have been undertaken there. Restoring the Pacific Northwest gathers and presents the best examples of state-of-the-art restoration techniques and projects. It is an encyclopedic overview that will be an invaluable reference not just for restorationists and students working in the Pacific Northwest, but for practitioners across North America and around the world.
Posted in Nature